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Bobbi McCallum image
I was so happy to get an email from one of Bobbi McCallum’s friends. It included the about image of Bobbi which I love. She looks so young and happy. Bobbi was an award-winning women’s page journalist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in the last 1960s before her death at age 25. I have an article about her coming out next year.
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Helen Gurley Brown book review
My review of a biography of Helen Gurley Brown, Bad Girls Go Everywhere, was published on H-Net today. It is available here. At one point, Helen wrote a column that ran in the women’s section. The column was based on her book, Sex and the Single Girl.
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Ruthe Deskin images
I am collecting images to be used with my article about Las Vegas journalist Ruthe Deskin. The article should run sometime in the next few months. This ad can be found in Ruthe’s papers at the UNLV. We went through the papers a few years ago. I am still looking for details about this image of Ruthe with Ann Landers.
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Anne Rowe presentation
I received word last week that my article about St. Petersburg Times women’s page editor. Rowe won several Penney-Missouri Awards in the 1960s and was one of the few women to become part of management. We collected information about Rowe from the Penney-Missouri Award papers at the University of Missouri and from the Nelson Poynter papers at the University of South Florida.
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Betty Preston article
Just received some positive feedback on my article about Glendale (California) women’s page editor Betty Preston Oiler. It took several years to piece together Betty’s story. (I am appreciative of the help her step-daughter Pam provided over the past year.) Betty was a women’s page editor beginning in the World War II years through the elimination of the section in the early 1970s. (She won several Penney-Missouri Awards.) She went on to be an executive editor at the newspaper in later years.
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New Gail Collins Book
I am reading the new Gail Collins’ book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. So far, she has two references to women’s pages. In the first, she references women’s pages as a limitation for women journalists in the 1960s. This I would basically agree with – although some women’s page journalists saw great advantages in writing for these sections. In the second reference (pg 351), she credits Betty Friedan and the women’s liberation movement for eliminating the women’s pages. I would counter that it was much more complicated than that – something my research is revealing.


